OETTINGER WARNS OF SPANISH CIVIL WAR

The EU’s budget commissioner, Günther Oettinger, warned this week of the risk of “civil war” in Catalonia. The situation certainly isn’t calming down. Raül Romeva, Catalonia’s foreign minister, on Friday announced that the Catalan parliament will attempt to meet on Monday — although he didn’t say where — in defiance of the Spanish Constitutional Court’s order to suspend a parliamentary session at which lawmakers were expected to vote on a declaration of independence from Spain. The European Commission’s deputy spokesman Alexander Winterstein said on Friday that Oettinger merely expressed his “worries about the situation in Catalonia, he also expressed his wish for the dialogue between Madrid and Barcelona to start soon.”

POLISH AMBASSADOR TO EU STEPS DOWN

Poland’s permanent representative to the European Union, Jarosław Starzyk, stepped down Friday after evidence emerged that he signed a collaboration agreement with the former communist regime. Starzyk was brought in to replace Marek Prawda who was perceived to be insufficiently loyal to the government and fired in February 2016. Playbook’s Polish source said Friday’s resignation should be seen as part of a wider effort by Jarosław Kaczyński to undermine Foreign Affairs Minister Witold Waszczykowski and his allies, including Starzyk. Overheard in the Polish permanent representation: “No one is going to cry after him here. He got what he was asking for.”

NATO’S STOLTENBERG CRITICIZES ANTI-NUCLEAR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, a decision motivated by growing tensions around North Korea’s missile testing and U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to destroy the country. In response, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg denounced the Nuclear Ban Treaty, an accord aimed at eliminating all nuclear weapons and championed by ICAN. The world’s nuclear powers, including three NATO members — the United States, France and the United Kingdom — oppose the Nuclear Ban Treaty. The Nobel committee said “the risk of nuclear weapons being used is greater than it has been for a long time.” It called on nuclear-armed countries to work on a “gradual, balanced and carefully monitored elimination of the almost 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world.”

COLLEGE OF EUROPE — DEAD BRITS SOCIETY

The College of Europe in Bruges, a breeding ground for Eurocrats since 1949, is having trouble attracting Brits to its campus in the wake of Brexit. So it’s making up the shortfall by naming rooms after dead Brits instead. The Sir Winston Churchill Room is now officially open, with the motto: “Let’s connect past, present and future.” The honor is unsurprising given that Churchill was one of the college’s co-founders, but it underlines the shortage of Brits signing up. Of the new intake of 345, just 10 are British. Even Ukraine has 12 students. There are no Brits at all studying economics and legal studies and just three taking politics, according the College’s admissions numbers, seen by Playbook.

LATEST EU CONFIDENTIAL PODCAST

Our latest podcast features Johan Dennelind, CEO of the Swedish telecoms giant Telia. Dennelind explains why Stockholm is second to only Silicon Valley in the tech world, why he think Emmanuel Macron’s idea of an EU agency for disruptive innovation is a bad idea, and why it’s in everyone’s business interest to care about the United Nations Sustainable Development goals.

ITALIAN LOBBYING SHAMBLES

The close-knit Italian lobbying network in Brussels is reeling from a curious scam that saw Confindustria, the Italian business lobbying association, fire Gianfranco Dell’Alba, the head of its delegation in Brussels. Dell’Alba, a former MEP, wired €500,000 of the organization’s money to a fraudster, Italian media reported. Dell’Alba supposedly believed he was acting on the instructions of his boss Marcella Panucci, but ended up sending the money without a counter-signature to a fake bank account.

Now it turns out that maybe it wasn’t €500,000 at all but over €600,000, a Confindustria official told Playbook. That the exact amount of money lost is still unclear raises several questions: How can the organization not know, or not admit, the precise sum that was involved even though it’s had two weeks to check what went missing and how? Giuseppe Turani, a leading financial journalist, said that even if Confindustria’s original version of events is true we may yet see a number of firings.

A message from the EPP Group: We have relaunched our Windhoek Dialogue this week, a long-standing initiative bringing together the center-right parties from the EU and Africa. In discussion with the democratic parties on the African continent, we want to define priorities for future EU-Africa relations and reaffirm that development aid cannot be effective without good governance.

WHEN MONARCHS GETS POLITICAL

Europe’s future is no longer in the hands of its kings and queens. But some of the Continent’s monarchs and heirs can’t resist getting involved in politics. This week’s case in point is Spanish King Felipe VI. Spain’s Sovereign Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece (one of Felipe’s many titles) admonished his unruly Catalan subjects for being disloyal to the state.

He isn’t the first modern-day European monarch to play an overtly political role. Belgium was without a government for 541 days in 2010-2011 and it fell to Albert II to knock political heads together to get them to agree to a new government and stick to EU budget rules. He caused even more controversy in 2012 when he appeared to compare the Flemish nationalist N-VA party with fascist movements of the 1930s.

Luxembourg is also no stranger to royal controversy. In 2008, Grand Duke Henri said he would refuse to give his assent to a law making euthanasia legal, which had been passed by Luxembourg’s Chamber of Deputies. In response, then Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, now European Commission president, proposed a constitutional amendment that means the Grand Duke can only “promulgate” laws.

For some monarchs, political statements are best made through the medium of hats: the U.K.’s Queen Elizabeth II wore a near replica of the EU flag on her head during the 2017 opening of the Houses of Parliament.

One European country, Liechtenstein, remains a de facto monarchy under Prince Hans-Adam II. In Bulgaria and Austria, monarchs went straight into politics. Simeon II, the last Bulgarian monarch, created his own party, the National Movement Simeon II (now the National Movement for Stability and Progress), and was prime minister from 2001 to 2005, leading Bulgaria into the EU. In Austria, Otto von Habsburg and his son Karl, heirs to the monarchy that ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both served in the European Parliament and lead the federalist Paneuropean Union.

RAILROADED

A short stretch of railway track in Lithuania has caused a great deal of fuss. This week the European Commission fined state-owned Lithuanian Railways nearly €28 million for ripping up tracks connecting Lithuania and Latvia. The Commission said the company removed the track with the sole aim of stopping a customer from switching to a competitor.

MICHEL OF ARC

“This is Magna Carta, it’s the Burgesses coming at parliament, it’s the great reform bill, it’s the bill of rights, it’s Waterloo, it’s Agincourt, it’s Crécy. We win all of these things,” said hardcore Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, recalling British glories dating back to the 14th century at the Conservative Party conference. Playbook wonders if talking up the Hundred Years’ War was the right thing to do. If so, will Michel Barnier now be considered the EU’s Joan of Arc or Bertrand Du Guesclin? And will he arrive at the next Brexit negotiating round in a suit of armor?

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT BORIS

There’s something about Boris Johnson, the U.K. foreign secretary, that makes him the center of attention. Much of this is fueled by Johnson himself who is widely regarded as funny and loves the attention. As a talented writer, he also has multiple platforms to make his points/cause mischief. Yet Playbook can’t help but feel that British and European opinion is starting to turn. More and more people laugh at, rather than with, Johnson: he’s on the slippery slope from national treasure to national embarrassment. Bad enough for anyone, but terrible when you’re the nation’s diplomatic face. The latest example came when Johnson said the war-torn Libyan city of Sirte only had to “clear the dead bodies” to become a world-class tourist and business destination.

WHO’S UP?

Jeremy Corbyn: Merely had to sit back and watch as Theresa May gave a speech with a terrible cough that was interrupted by a prankster, and during which letters on the backdrop fell off.

AND WHO’S DOWN?

Mariano Rajoy: The Spanish prime minister faced criticism over his handling of the Catalan vote and police violence.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“The only good thing about Brexit is that we’ll never have to listen to Mr. [Nigel] Farage again.”

— Esteban González Pons, center-right Spanish MEP, angry that Farage took Catalonia’s side in its fight with Madrid and the EU.

FEUD OF THE WEEK

Catalonia vs. the Commission. If you thought Catalan frustration is reserved only for Madrid, don’t be fooled. The Catalan government is also very annoyed at the EU, especially since their representative in Brussels is a former senior Commission spokesman, Amadeu Altafaj. He called it “disappointing that during the [Commission’s] midday briefing there was not a single word on the 893 people who were injured. These are EU citizens. We are not talking about any country at the end of the world. These are 893 Catalan and EU citizens that were injured.” The Commission would only say it had “confidence” in the government of Mariano Rajoy and offer platitudes about these being “times for unity and stability, not divisiveness and fragmentation.”

GAFFES & LAUGHS

Commission’s flawed news management: The European Commission has taken further legal action against Hungary over a recent law on foreign-funded NGOs, news it was forced to reveal after accidentally publishing the press release a day early. The Commission then deleted the press release and reposted it alongside other legal action news.

Breakfast means breakfast: A German court ruled Monday that bread rolls and coffee aren’t considered a complete breakfast and therefore are not subject to taxation. If governments want to tax breakfast-providing German restaurants, they’ll need to prove the meal is served with cold cuts, cheese or spreads, German media reported.

The gray vote: The average age of U.K. Conservative Party members is 71.

A message from the EPP Group: The jobs of hundreds of people are being endangered due to unfair trading practices. We cannot stand idly by while our market is being flooded with products made in third countries, which is why the EPP Group brokered an agreement on protecting European industry against dumped and subsidized imports from third countries. The new approach for examining substantial market distortions differentiates between WTO members and non-WTO members and replaces the calculation methodology that was based on whether a country had the status of a market economy or a non-market economy. The regulation is a reaction to immense pressure from China, who requested WTO consultations with the EU and the U.S. on December 12, 2016, a day after the expiry of the relevant parts of China’s accession protocol to the World Trade Organization. China’s excess production capacity and subsidized economy, especially in the steel sector, bears the risk of significant price-distortion.